The Magnetized Man

The stressed or poor think about more and the relaxed and rich think about less. We often equate stressing or lots of thinking with being smarter, a more critical thinker, and more perceptive. There are times when this can be very useful, such as evaluating an expensive product or deciding to get a second opinion on a diagnosis. But it can often serve as background noise, preventing you from being present and applying your energy towards your goals. Often, this is because we create a lot of worse case scenarios in our heads (based on things we’ve seen on the news or maybe things we’ve done ourselves) and this causes us to keep using our brains to predict what will happen and counteract it. Unfortunately, when that reality doesn’t exist to anyone but us, people find us irritating and we’re left feeling exhausted and unappreciated, because no one has recognized or rewarded the crisis we’ve just averted. 

It’s hard. When you’ve built up a series of thought patterns around particular fears, they become automatic and they seem rational even though they are just emotion. That’s energy in motion that could be applied towards other things. When you’re constantly overthinking every situation, you are literally leaking energy every single day. Consider the following instances of this. 

Neural efficiency and glucose

When you have an efficient neural system, your brain is able to get more done with less energy. This energy that your brain uses mainly comes from glucose. According to imaging studies, some brains or particular brain states are able to perform certain tasks with a lower metabolic cost (or neural cost) than others. In other words, if two brains burn glucose to perform the same task, the brain that burns less fuel is more efficient. 

When a brain is more efficient, it has more precise firing, which leads to less noise. It also has better synaptic tuning, networks that are more specialized and stronger, and less redundant activation. This means that there’s less unnecessary firing of neurons, less ion pumping, lower demand for ATP, and lower glucose usage. 

For instance, brain scans of novices performing a task reveal higher glucose use and widespread neural activation whereas experts performing a task have lower glucose use and more focused neural activation. This means that lower glucose use does not equal a weaker brain. It equals a more efficient brain, better tuned brain. 

Consider the following excerpt from, “The Physics and Physiology of Focus: How to Weaponize Your Attention and Turn Thoughts Into Matter”: 

“Studies suggest that when you switch tasks, there is increased glucose metabolic activity in your brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, which helps you with higher level thinking. Every time you move to a different task, your brain needs more glucose. This in and of itself is not a bad thing. If you’re working towards a goal, it’s good for the strategic, creative part of your brain to have the energy it needs to make connections and come up with ideas. But when you’ve constructed a false self based on lies, your prefrontal cortex is focused on being strategic and creative and spotting connections all in the service of feeding the lies, images, and performances necessary to maintain that false self. 

And then what happens? Your brain – and your false identity – runs out of glucose and you need more food. But because you intuitively sense that effort is supposed to come with some kind of a reward – an objective outcome – you wonder why you don’t feel that great. So you grab things that make you feel good in a cheap and temporary way: junk food, drugs, alcohol. If you’d been working on something you care about, you’d have the reward right in front of you: the physical manifestation of your efforts. As a result, you wouldn’t need as much external help getting to that feel-good state. Instead, you are getting unwanted byproducts when you’re getting the outcome of your false self surviving. These byproducts are credit card bills, regrettable texts sent in a moment of fear and loneliness, hangovers, and whatever else. And because you’ve made yourself the centre of the universe, you intuitively know that you deserve all of these outcomes, so you’re constantly in a cycle of either blaming others, taking erratic action and burning yourself out, or numbing the pain. But the thing that wanted all of this energy – your brain and your ego and your false self – remains intact.”

Lies require a lot of fuel. When you’re feeding a false self, you need a lot of glucose, but your brain – and overall your body – feels awful and exhausted, because this is super inefficient. Plus, there are all kinds of side effects like health effects, weight gain, and financial loss. So yes, it feels like you’re gaining energy in the short term, but you’re actually leaking a lot of energy. 

Lies are tied to ego and the ego is tied to arrogance. The ego says, “I am right” and “I know what’s best” and “I’m thinking about x,y,z factors that could go wrong, and they aren’t.” If this makes you feel defensive, that’s okay. Instead think, “Ego is right,” “Ego knows what’s best” “Ego is thinking about xyz factors that could go wrong, and they aren’t.” This helps you create a sense of separation from the “I” and it helps you want to shake off this thing that is taking charge of your decisions and taking up so much of your energy. 

A helpful visual might be the visual of a cancerous tumour. Believe it or not, tumours begin to develop their own network of blood vessels. In other words, your body begins to build a network to make sure the tumour is getting enough blood and oxygen. Eventually it needs more and more and more and more, depleting the rest of the body. The same idea applies to the ego. If it goes unchecked, it keeps creating more networks and blood vessels that feed it. “I have to have money.” “I have to have status.” And the soul gets less and less attention. Your ego most certainly gets fed, but something else starts to wither and die: your spirit, your relationships, etc.